Cycling is a natural option for many city-dwellers in warmer weather, but is not the solution for everyone.

Driving, for many, is the only reasonable option. But it shouldn’t be. And Toronto is keeping parking prices artificially low to encourage this practice.

Across Canada, Torontonians actually pay comparatively low rates for parking downtown. According to global real estate firm Colliers International’s 12th Annual Parking Survey, Calgary comes out with the worst of the worst but Toronto parking rates are lower than Calgary, Edmonton and Montreal.

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This data, provided by Colliers International, shows average monthly parking costs for downtown areas in each respective city.

Toronto is growing quickly, and its downtown population is rising faster than the infrastructure beneath it was designed to absorb the new crowds.

According to Green P’s annual report, in 2011 the operation pulled in $119-million in parking fees. After expenses, that resulted in $57-million in revenue.

Of the 38,000 or so Green P parking spots in the city, less than a third, about 11,400, of them are in the downtown core.

Toronto is bursting at the seams and drivers are facing a shadow tax for their car ownership in the form of parking tickets that are issued by the tens of thousands when the meagre lots available overflow.

The vast majority of parking tickets are issued in the downtown core of the city. The suburbs, where it is far more reasonable to own and operate a car for daily trips, are almost immune from parking tickets.

Parking tickets are an effective tax on those who would drive their cars downtown.

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This data, provided by City of Toronto, shows the total number of parking tickets issued in 2011 in each neighbourhood.

This is an unjust way of taxing car usage in Toronto’s core. Instead, choosing to own a car and drive downtown needs to be taxed in an up-front transparent way that will actually discourage car ownership and driving in the core.

As Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne writes, congestion taxes and tolls are ineffective because they only punish people who live outside the core. But as the cost of congestion rises, so too must the cost of contributing to that congestion.

Parking infrastructure is already built to favour commuters, and that’s the right approach. But with an over-stretched transit system deterring new passengers, heavy and immediate investment from all levels of government on public transit infrastructure is desperately needed.

The myth that Toronto is a drivable city can only be maintained as long as the driving public fails to realize that parking tickets are the hidden tax on cars. With nearly 3 million tickets issued every year — clustered in a tight geographic space at the core of the city — that day is fast approaching.

City-run parking lots in downtown Toronto are over-burdened, forcing people to park on to the street nearby where they get thousands of parking tickets every month. Data on city-run parking facilities across Toronto obtained by Canada.com, combined with city parking infraction data, shows just how bad the situation for downtown drivers is.